Colorado Libertarian Party Primary Results

The Colorado Libertarian Party held a statewide primary on August 10. This was the first time Colorado had provided a statewide primary for any party, other than the Democratic and Republican Parties, since 1914 and 1916, years in which the Progressive (“Bull Moose”) Party had Colorado primaries.

For Governor, Jaimes Brown defeated Dan “Kilo” Sallis, 62% to 38%. For U.S. Senate, Maclyn Stringer defeated John Finger, 53% to 47%. No news source seems to have mentioned how many voters voted in the Libertarian Party primary. Colorado has closed primaries. Independent voters are free to change registration on primary election day and join any party. However, the Democratic and Republican primaries were so competitive this year for U.S. Senator, probably very few independent voters enrolled in the Libertarian Party on primary day. The Libertarian Party had 8,453 registered voters in Colorado as of a few months ago.

I came up with 2093 votes in the 24 counties with the most registrants (about 94% of statewide registration.

Turn-out (or turn-in, since this was largely a by-mail election) was around 25% of voters. If ballots were not mailed to unaffiliated voters, it might have taken some effort to change one’s registration.

A couple of counties had party registration which was a bit higher than shown on the SoS website, so there might have been some folks who had moved, updating their registration. On the state rolls, Libertarian and unaffiliated inactive voters are about 40% of active voters, compared to 23% for Republicans, 29% for Democrats, and 66% for Greens.